Looking back on this time, Heinrich Scholl later noted: ‘Mother drinks heavily, salon does worse and worse. Mother is drunk in her flat from midday onwards, hairdressers do as they please. She’s in the red. Gitti asks me to deal with it. I advise her to give up the hair salon and put in an application for a cosmetics business. She doesn’t like the idea, because of what people might think.’
What people might think was as important to Brigitte Scholl as it was to her mother. Everyone knew the elegant Frau Knorrek and her salon. There was the station, the bar, the Daimler works, the dentist, the grocer’s—and there was the hairdresser’s in Theaterstrasse, where half the town met, where everyone talked about everyone else, and each piece of news, each divorce, each new baby, each affair was weighed in the balance. The hairdresser’s salon was the small town’s meeting place, and Brigitte Scholl knew how quickly you could lose your standing among the locals. She didn’t want her mother to close the salon.
Heinrich Scholl didn’t think this particularly sensible from an economic point of view, but once again he had an idea. He put in an application for a private business for his wife in Ludwigsfelde and set up a salon for her in her mother’s shop. They now had two shops in one, and if need be, daughter could absorb mother’s losses.
Brigitte Scholl was happy. She no longer had to go to Teltow every day and be bossed about by her employer; she could receive her customers in her own studio. She created a file card for each one with name, age and skin type. Young and old women came to her in Theaterstrasse from Ludwigsfelde and the surrounding villages, and raved about her treatment. Brigitte Scholl knew all about the skin’s acid mantle, about facial muscles and the harmony of body, mind and soul; she could blend rose petals, camomile and horsetail to create healing tinctures, massage foreheads and necks—and she was a good listener too. The business was soon doing better than her mother’s; she was even earning more than her husband.
After his studies in Riesa, Heinrich Scholl had planned to start work as a technologist in the industrial plant in Ludwigsfelde. But aircraft construction was discontinued when the first jet plane got caught in a power line on its demonstration flight and never made it to Leipzig, where Walter Ulbricht was waiting with other guests of honour. The plant now produced trucks. There was no job for him.
He became a teacher at the plant’s vocational college, teaching materials science, giving polytechnic classes and preparing young people from the juvenile detention centre for their training. He had to serve in the army too—a year and a half of basic military service with the Motorised Infantry Division in Stahnsdorf. He didn’t want to, but army service was obligatory, and once again he found a way to set himself apart from the others. When his regimental commanding officer needed a gift for a Russian commander, Heinrich Scholl made a tinplate model of an armoured personnel carrier, fifty centimetres by ninety centimetres, which he mounted on a wooden panel. The Russian commander was delighted, and Heinrich Scholl had a new job. He no longer had to drive tanks; from now on he was allowed to make little model ones. To begin with, he made his model tanks in the barracks; later on, towards the end of his military service, he was even given special permission to make them at home.
When he returned from the army, there was a job in the car works. Heinrich Scholl’s bosses found their new technologist hard to fathom. Like most East Germans, Scholl was under observation by officials of the Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, and by neighbours and colleagues working as Stasi informants. His Stasi file contains several pages extolling his ambition, his helpfulness and his expertise, but as soon as his attitude to the communist state is at issue, the tone changes: ‘Heinrich Scholl has numerous West German contacts, is politically indecisive and hard to read, does not engage in group activities and is an employee of the indifferent, dilatory type, who no longer knows his place, associating in private only with doctors and other high-status figures.’
Heinrich Scholl was a showpiece engineer in a showpiece socialist factory, but he tried to block out the socialist part. He knew which compromises he had to accept and which he didn’t. When he was invited to become a member of the German Socialist Unity Party and civilian paramilitary groups, he declined. When the invitations persisted, he took on the post of secretary of Free German Youth and registered with Civil Defence. After that, he was left in peace for the time being. ‘I always found a way of getting off lightly, you might say,’ says Heinrich Scholl.
His wife knew no such worries. She had her private salon—her own little niche in the communist state. The only organisation she was a member of was the Free German Federation of Trade Unions, and she only joined that because it got her a holiday trip to the Baltic every few years.
In Ludwigsfelde, Brigitte Scholl surrounded herself with a small circle of women—others she preferred to keep at bay. To those who didn’t know her, she could seem priggish and aloof. Her sister in Cologne sent her clothes, and West German money, too, so that she could shop in the state-run Intershop chain, which only accepted foreign currency and sold high-quality goods not usually available to East Germans. Gitti didn’t have to join the department-store queues when there were jeans or Adidas trainers to be had. When the people of Ludwigsfelde flocked to the lake in droves to go swimming in the summer, Gitti walked past them with hat, picnic rug and hamper to her own bathing spot. It was a small clearing by one of the gravel pits that the farmers had excavated in the thirties for the construction of Hitler’s motorways. You drove to Kleinbeuthen, a village near Ludwigsfelde, and then followed a narrow path along the shore. The clearing was across a field, between two birches. Everyone knew that Gitti met her friends here—and that they all swam in the nude. But it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to join them uninvited.
In the evenings, couples met to dance in the town’s new clubhouse or in the bar called ‘Sanssouci’. As a late wedding present from his mother, Heinrich Scholl had been given a pair of pointy black shoes and a suede coat with a fake fur collar. When he danced with Gitti, a circle formed around them.
Gitti’s mother was drinking more and more. She hardly showed up in the salon at all now and hadn’t been able to keep the books for a long time. Sometimes her daughter would find her in the kitchen, lying on the floor.
In 1972 she had to close down the shop, and without the shop her daughter no longer had a place for her beauty treatments. Heinrich Scholl set his wife up in Frank’s bedroom to be going on with and put in an application to exchange their flat and Gitti’s mother’s flat for a house.
A year later, they were allocated a semi-detached house in the wooden housing development, which had a reputation in Ludwigsfelde as a desirable neighbourhood. The house might have been old and in need of repair, but it had four hundred square metres of garden. Heinrich Scholl had walls pulled down and the roof retiled; he converted the cellar, had a bar and a big tiled bathroom put in, had a fireplace built, and a barbecue, and changed the layout of the garden. He designed everything and drew all the plans himself; friends and workmen helped him with the building work in the evenings and at the weekend.
The renovation took almost two years. Gitti’s mother lived in a little room under the roof and only came downstairs in the mornings to go and buy her daily ration of schnapps in the shop across the road. One morning, she didn’t emerge. Gitti found her in her room. Dead. Beside her bed were two empty bottles and an empty packet of tablets.
When customers asked what had happened, Brigitte Scholl said her mother had fallen down the stairs. She was concerned for her family’s reputation. Her mother may have been a hapless drinker, but that was nobody’s business. Gitti’s friend Karin*, the local vet’s wife, says she always tried to put on a show of perfection.
Hardly was the funeral over when Brigitte Scholl’s perfect world was shattered all over again. She got a phone call: her sister Ursula in Cologne had died unexpectedly—a fall in the bathroom, she was told.
Ursula Knorrek was fifteen years older than Brigitte Scholl.
She had run the Estée Lauder sales agency for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and although she had no children, she had a big house and a husband who earned a decent salary. Brigitte Scholl had always envied her sister her eventful life. Ursula had been her role model, the big sister who had felt hemmed in living in Ludwigsfelde and left it for a world which Brigitte Scholl, in her tiny beauty salon, could only dream of. Ursula sent postcards to Ludwigsfelde from her trips around the world. Paris. Vienna. London. She went to fashion shows and met people you could gawk at in gossip magazines. Sometimes Ursula featured in the photos too.
At the funeral in Cologne, Brigitte Scholl found out that her sister had taken her own life with an overdose of tablets. But no one really knew why. All that was said was that she had had trouble coming to terms with her age.
It was 1979 and Brigitte Scholl was only in her mid-thirties. Though beauty and youth were her profession, and she stood in her salon five days a week, from eight until six, fighting signs of age, she hadn’t yet realised that she herself was aging too. Most of her customers were older than she was and admired her smooth, unlined skin, her perfectly arched eyebrows, her full mouth. She was still a woman who could steal the limelight—but her sister’s death made her realise that her youth too would one day be over.
Brigitte Scholl had a midlife crisis and took a lover. He was the son of a couple they were friends with—an actor, ten years younger than her. Her husband knew nothing of his wife’s affair; he was busy doing up the house and sorting out her inheritance.
A few months after the death of Brigitte Scholl’s sister, her brother-in-law also took his life. The house in Cologne had to be sold off and the antique furniture sent across the inter-German border to Ludwigsfelde. Heinrich Scholl still clearly recalls the trouble he had getting the furniture from Cologne over the border. He doesn’t know what Gitti’s feelings were. ‘She never cried,’ he says. ‘Not in front of me at any rate—and I never cried in front of her. We were brought up tough.’
He didn’t discover that his wife had betrayed him with a young actor until years later, when he read his Stasi file.
Life went on. The house was finished at last; they had more room, a fireplace, a barbecue, two bathrooms and the furniture from the West. Brigitte Scholl led her guests around the rooms as if around a museum. An old grandfather clock here, the Biedermeier bureau there, a mahogany cupboard. She had inherited the entire household from Cologne. Rugs, crockery, cutlery, table cloths, lamps—and shop fittings for a complete beauty salon. The neighbours still remember the two big containers that stood in the street. Anything that didn’t fit in the house was sold. There was soon a new car parked outside the Scholls’ front door. The Stasi noted in their records that Heinrich Scholl moved in circles that belonged to ‘the upper crust of Ludwigsfelde’.
In the car works, Heinrich Scholl was in charge of the new drop forge, a prestigious East German project overseen in person by Politburo member Günter Mittag. Scholl was an expert in the field and spoke better English than any of his colleagues; he led negotiations with Brits, Swedes and Austrians. Only travel abroad was barred to him. Time and again he applied for travel cadre status, and time and again his application was turned down. ‘They kept saying the passport wasn’t ready,’ Heinrich Scholl says, ‘and then the party secretary would go to Vienna or Stockholm in my place, although he didn’t have the first clue. In the end, I realised the passport would never be ready.’
Heinrich Scholl wasn’t getting anywhere. He didn’t know where to channel his skills and his energy. He wasn’t the only one who had problems. His school friend Dieter Fahle had trained as a glassblower after being thrown out of the car works. His best friend Hans had applied for an exit visa and moved to North Rhine Westphalia with his family. One of his colleagues planned to escape, because he was fed up with waiting for an exit visa. Scholl thought that too dangerous and, with the help of a doctor friend, got his workmate a medical certificate to speed up the process. Their meetings to discuss this plan took place in Ludwigsfelde Woods. Heinrich Scholl couldn’t bring himself to make such a radical move. Everything he possessed in Ludwigsfelde had been laboriously built up. The house was finished at last and Gitti’s salon was doing better than ever before. But much as he loved Ludwigsfelde, he was beginning to feel hemmed in living in East Germany.
Scholl was constantly running up against walls, and eventually he could take no more. At a meeting with the factory’s Swedish contracting partners, he was to confirm a drop forge delivery to the value of several million marks. It wasn’t that they had any need of the delivery in Ludwigsfelde; it was just to give the Swedes the impression that the East German economy was making good progress. Scholl said it was nonsense. His superiors said it was the party line.
It wasn’t Heinrich Scholl’s line. Sitting in the meeting with the Swedes, he explained the problem to them. He thought his colleagues and the Stasi people at the table didn’t speak sufficiently good English. But it was evidently enough. The next day, the director general summoned his head technologist to his office, accused him of political sabotage and issued him with a reprimand. Heinrich Scholl stood up, left the room, got the secretary to give him pen and paper and wrote a letter of resignation.
He was now unemployed, but because there’s no such thing as unemployment in a communist state, he was officially employed as his wife’s caretaker. This didn’t bother Scholl; it was what he did anyway. And for a man like him, even a caretaker’s job had its challenges. He immediately began to come up with new projects for himself. He collected bits of coloured glass and made lamps with them, planned an extension for his old friend Dieter’s house, designed a garden for Gitti’s friend Gudrun, built a fireplace for the master butcher in the nearby town of Grossbeeren. He was earning no less money than his former colleagues in the car works.
Brigitte Scholl was nevertheless embarrassed. She didn’t want to be married to a caretaker, not even her own.
When her customers walked down the hall to the beauty salon, they would see her husband sitting at breakfast. In the past, she had been able to say: ‘My husband is head technologist.’ Now she said: ‘My husband’s doing Dieter’s extension.’
Heinrich Scholl felt her scornful glance as he went down to his cellar workshop, her reproachful silence at the supper table. He worked all day long, he earned money and still he felt like a failure. It was as if he’d moved back in with his mother.
He applied for work in local businesses—in Caputh, where the palace was being restored, and in the microchip factory in Teltow. ‘At first they’d say yes, great, come and see us,’ Heinrich Scholl says. ‘But as soon as they read my personal file, I’d get a rejection.’ In Heinrich Scholl’s personal file, it said he was ‘politically indifferent’ and that he had sabotaged important deals in the car works with partners from non-socialist foreign countries. He hadn’t had work now for six months. Gitti was growing more and more taciturn.
A neighbour who was an acrobat said that Berolina Circus was looking for a technical manager. Scholl rang up. The circus manager said he’d be glad to employ him, but he should send in a written application to be on the safe side. Two weeks later, a rejection came from the circus’s personnel department. It was the last straw for Scholl.
He got in his Wartburg Tourist and drove to Berlin-Hoppegarten, where the circus had its winter quarters. The manager was standing at the entrance when Heinrich Scholl got out of his car. He knew nothing of the letter of rejection and told Scholl he could start the next day; his secretary would just draft the contract. The secretary shook her head—no, she couldn’t; orders from above. The circus manager put an arm around Heinrich Scholl’s shoulder, took him to the canteen and asked him: ‘Have you got something to write on?’
Heinrich Scholl tore a page out of his diary; the circus manager drafted the contract.
Two days later they were travelling through the southern regions of East Germany along with elephants, tigers and giraffes.
Berolina
Circus was a collective combine—a big, heavily subsidised socialist company that employed dressage riders, acrobats, tightrope walkers, clowns and animal tamers. Heinrich Scholl was in charge of a hundred and thirty wagons and seventy employees. He had to choose a plot of land, organise transportation and arrange for the big top to be put up and taken down. Every three days, the circus moved to a different town; in big cities it stopped a week. Heinrich Scholl’s work day began at seven o’clock; in the evenings, when the performance started, he knocked off and could read, go for a jog, do his shopping or have a look around town. After the show, the ping pong table was put up in the ring and he would play Chinese table tennis with acrobats and animal tamers until the early hours of the morning. ‘We had the Leuzingers with us—the Swiss tamer family,’ he says. ‘Seven tigers. And Frau Böttcher with her polar bears. It was marvellous. Terrific. Like a blood transfusion.’
But the best thing about the circus was Scholl’s circus caravan—three metres by seven, complete with loo, wash basin, sofa bed, table and three chairs. It was only a simple wooden box on wheels with screwed-down furniture, small windows and cheap crockery, but it was his own world.
Scholl wanted for nothing.
For the first time in his life, he could do what he liked. He hung up his oil pictures, which had only stood around in the cellar at home because Gitti didn’t like them. He took along his record player and a few classical records, and before turning in he would pour himself a big glass of red wine. Never in his life had he felt so free.
Heinrich Scholl calls his time at the circus ‘my first escape from home’.
The Scholl Case Page 5